Weekends. How I love weekends. The past week hasn’t been very kind to me, except on my birthday when my friends touched me with their text, YM, email, MSN and Friendster messages. A few even wished me on their blogs, and I just felt like running over to their place and giving them a big, warm narrowhug. I had a simple family dinner over at Italiannies, where the crew even sang two songs for me - complete with a tambourine accompaninent, at that! (Ok, not so ’simple’ after all, huh?). All of that, including the birthday celebrations since as early as April, meant so much to me and it couldn’t have been more wonderful.

Screwed Up Recruitment Process

One of my employment applications had run into some problems, after having gone through a period of grueling recruitment process. It was a case of ’so close yet so far’. I realized I was motivated by all that hope and expectations and when I wasn’t offered the division I wanted, it hit me hard. I lost confidence, hope and heck, appetite too. Would you believe that the HR people didn’t even know the difference between electrical and electronics? I had to play the good guy and explain to them the difference and the next thing I knew, my eardrums rang of “oooohh… I see”. They also thought “IT” and “engineering” were similar.

A friend offered consolation, “There’s a reason why she is in HR you know”, referring to the HR lady who spoke to me. Ah, that put a smile on my face, albeit a faint one. I’ve withdrawn my application, and I’m not sure about other offers right now. I’m still looking for other opportunities. I’ve since recovered from that ’shock’, and reviewed my goals. I now have sights on something else. With this renewed hope, I’m back to square one again. Admittedly, when things get repetitive, it gets a little tiring and like the Hokkien would say, sien. But giving up is not even an option. So there. To my close friends who’ve talked to me about it, I’m feeling great today! Two days ago, a friend, XY, called and we somehow touched on this. She related a similar personal experience and I thought that was very nice of her to share.

Note to Self: Short-term Goals

I actually came up with a coupla short-term goals, since I’ve finished my studies:-

  1. Pick up reading again
  2. Obviously get a damn job
  3. Get my CC by completing 3 more Toastmasters speeches
  4. Return to gym, and be consistent!
  5. Improve my Mandarin (I now can read more, but not enough!)
Back to Gym

I finally went to the gym the other day - after having been absent for about a month, no thanks to the hectic schedule in university. After the final exams, I lacked motivation and bummed around a little longer while wallowing in the post-exam bliss. Mr A, who had been as inactive as me, was even talking about paying the termination fee and quitting altogether. That’s not a good sign, heh. Anyway, that night I was knocked out by the time I finished the third set working out my arms. Came home and dived right into bed. Well, sorta.

Writing is ‘In’ Again

Also, to my newfound ‘pen pal’ (gee I wonder how often the term ‘pen pal’ is used today, what with all that tech and stuff), thanks for the exchanges. Bet you didn’t know I could churn out so many words in an email. It’s been a while since I wrote lengthy emails. (Identity of my ‘pen pal’ is withheld to maintain anonymity!!).

A Blast into the Past

Have you ever heard of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine? It’s a pretty ambitious project that aims to archive the web. I tried it out and guess what, I saw my old blog! Oh the memories… *sobs*. I started the blog, named Living Gem (http://narrowband.blogspot.com - don’t bother visiting, the URL now belongs to someone I dunno) in 2004 and had been active until some time in 2006, I deleted it. I still keep all the archives with me though. I somehow felt that the direction Living Gem was headed wasn’t quite like what I’d expected. I wasn’t comfortable with that. There were lots of personal entries and my readership base was mushrooming. Ah, n00b, I was. That’s partly why I wrote So You Want to be a Blogger?

Anyway, I tried that Internet Archive thingy and found 2 pages of my old blog archived on December 13th, 2005 and February 2nd, 2006 (you may click to view them). As you can see, I loved to customize my blog according to festive seasons… hehe. In the archived pages, please don’t mind that center column’s position - it appears to be slightly ‘bumped’ down. Back then it wasn’t like that :). And the blogger ‘navbar’ on top of the page too… for some reason it appears abit messy in the archived pages.

Have a fantastic weekend!

Related Entries: